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Invertebrate   Listen
adjective
Invertebrate  adj.  (Zool.) Destitute of a backbone; having no vertebrae; of or pertaining to the Invertebrata.
Age of invertebrates. See Age, and Silurian.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Invertebrate" Quotes from Famous Books



... ... umah ... no, of course not. Let me see. Are you at all familiar with the laws pertaining to refraction of ... umah, no." He cleared his throat again, unhappily. "Have you ever seen a medusa, Mr. Crowley? The gelatinous umbrella-shaped free swimming form of marine invertebrate related to the coral polyp and ...
— The Common Man • Guy McCord (AKA Dallas McCord Reynolds)

... Schmidt in his Contribution to the comparative Anatomy of the Invertebrate animals, &c., (translated in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, vol. v, p. 1,) says that in young Crustacea, "we find plain primitive fibres, which subsequently ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin

... ourselves that we had discovered a new "outlook," and we came a bad cropper. The simian antics of an impossible bell boy, in an impossible hotel, and his maneuvers in the arena of finance, were the "motive" of this extremely invertebrate contribution. There was an "Arizona Copper King"; there was his daughter; there was a gentleman from "Tombstone, Ariz.," and there were some tourists drawn after the Clyde Fitch style, but with none of his lightness ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various

... cross: the hands open, the fingers separated. The right leg is straight. The left, whence flowed the hemorrhage that made him die, has been broken by a shell; it is twisted into a circle, dislocated, slack, invertebrate. A mournful irony has invested the last writhe of his agony with the appearance of a ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... sudden change for the better in the following year. All this is to be found clearly recorded year by year, season by season, with all the peculiarities of "form;" of umbrella and umbrella-carrying; of dancing, energetic and invertebrate; of handshaking, sensible and high-level (which was invented, of course, by the ballroom girl who was holding up her train in the dance); of hirsute adornment and aesthetic craze—every shade of fashion is followed in its true development and in its wane—down to the recent phase ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... know the groups and the marks of the vertebrates is to know a truth which possesses generality, in contradistinction to the particularism of Whitman's poetic consciousness. Even so to know well the groups and marks of human character, vertebrate and invertebrate, is to know that of which the average man, in his hand to hand struggle with life, is ignorant. Such a wisdom Shakespeare possessed to a unique degree, and it enabled him to reconstruct human life. He did not merely ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... the Venetian world in its gossiping, home-keeping, parsimonious, professional walks; for I observed for the first time that she had acquired by contact something of the trick of the familiar, soft-sounding, almost infantile speech of the place. I judged that she had imbibed this invertebrate dialect from the natural way the names of things and people—mostly purely local—rose to her lips. If she knew little of what they represented she knew still less of anything else. Her aunt had drawn in—her failing interest in the table mats and lampshades ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James

... qualities the nomad possesses. Hence the union of these two elements, imperious pastor superimposed upon peaceful tiller, has made the only stable governments among savage and semi-civilized races.[1097] The politically invertebrate peoples of dark Africa have secured the back-bone to erect states only from nomad conquerors. The history of the Sudan cannot be understood apart from a knowledge of the Sahara and its peoples. All the Sudanese states were formed ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... spiritually invertebrate, destitute of object in existence, bereft of all hope. What mattered it whether he won or lost in this stupid contest whose prize was possession of a few trinkets set with bits of glittering stone? If ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance

... receivin' clandecent bundles and letters, eh?" he began. Flip sent one swift, withering look of contempt at the Postmaster, who at once becoming invertebrate and groveling, mumbled that he must "get on" to the Crossing, and rose to go. But the old man, who had counted on his presence for moral support, and was clearly beginning to hate him for precipitating this scene with his daughter, whom he ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... difficulty is by no means all of the kind which opposes unmistakable impediments to the reader's path. Some of it is of the more insidious kind, which may co-exist with a delightful persuasion that the way is absolutely clear, and Browning's "obscurity" an invention of the invertebrate. The problems presented by his writing are merely tough, and will always yield to intelligent and patient scrutiny. But the problems presented by his mind are elusive, and it would be hard to resist the cogency of his interpreters, if it were ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... even if they have not been taken too seriously by the people of these islands, have for a long time past respected themselves, but the calling of a dramatist till quite of late has been but an invertebrate and spiritless concern. Pruned and prismed by the censor, exploited by the actor, dragooned and slashed by the manager, ignored by the public, who never even bothered to inquire the names of those who supplied it with digestives—it was a slave's ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy

... Britain and these other towns out of it that I make these remarks: for Bath is a fine town, Edinburgh is a fine town, even Glasgow and Newcastle are towns, while London is still a straggling, sprawling, invertebrate, inchoate, overgrown village. I am as free, I hope, from anti-patriotic as from patriotic prejudice. The High Street in Oxford, Milsom Street in Bath, Princes Street in Edinburgh, those are all fine streets ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... thoroughly than another, it was the Nile Expedition of 1884-5. What began as a forlorn hope ended in complete failure, and in three short months French experienced the miseries of retreat, of failure, and of work under an invertebrate War Office. ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm

... supposition are these:—That if you go through the enormous thickness of the earth's crust and get down to the older rocks, the higher vertebrate animals—the quadrupeds, birds, and fishes—cease to be found; beneath them you find only the invertebrate animals; and in the deepest and lowest rocks those remains become scantier and scantier, not in any very gradual progression, however, until, at length, in what are supposed to be the oldest rocks, the animal remains which are found are almost always confined to ...
— The Method By Which The Causes Of The Present And Past Conditions Of Organic Nature Are To Be Discovered.—The Origination Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley

... time, across this immense diversity, and presents to us as a definite result, a continual progress in the development of which man is the term, of which the four classes of vertebrates are intermediate forms, and the totality of invertebrate animals the ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... made but halting and feeble efforts to keep pace with the requirements of the public. Dealing as it does with the imports of the whole country, which now amount in value to L10,000,000, the figures we have given must serve merely to illustrate its invertebrate methods of handling traffic, as well as its grasping greed in enforcing the rates fixed by the terms of its concession. Its forty miles of Rand steam tram-line and thirty-five miles of railway from the Vaal River, with some little assistance from the ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... branches swell and bud out new trunks, new branches, guided, controlled, by gravity, light, and warmth; and just beyond the reach of the tides, leaves sprouted, flowers opened and fruit ripened. Weeks after the last slow invertebrate plodder had made his escape shorewards, the taut liana strand was again crowded with a mass of passing life—a maze of vines and creepers, whose tendrils and suckers reached and curled and pressed onward, fighting for gangway to shore, through days and ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... one of the invertebrate branches we find representatives which interest us chiefly because they appear to have reached their present condition by retrograde evolution. Barnacles are really crustacea, but they have lost their eyes as well as some other structures that are most useful ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... husband dead and the babe in her womb, and entering the shelter offered by the amorous Turk. And I can picture her during the fourteen years of her imprisoned life, the disillusion, the heart-break, the despair. No wonder the invertebrate soul could do no more for her daughter than teach her monosyllabic English and the rudiments of reading and writing. Doubtless she babbled of western life with its freedom and joyousness for women; but four years have elapsed ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... and the skeletons, side by side. You remember that slinking black satin snakelike sheath that Gita Morini wore in "Little Eyolf"? There it dangles, limp, invertebrate, yet how eloquent! No other woman in the world could have worn that gown, with its unbroken line from throat to hem, its smooth, high, black satin collar, its writhing tail that went slip-slip-slipping after her. In it she ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber

... and inventors in the methods of investigation which they adopted to solve the many problems with which their names are coupled. Among these may be cited Copernicus' theory of the earth's movement, Lamarck's classification of vertebrate and invertebrate animals, the laws of friction, the laws of combustion and respiration, the elevation of the continents, the laws of gravitation, the undulatory theory of light and heat, steam as a motive power in navigation, flying machines, ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell

... general gain of order, and the full production which results of art. The highest point is reached in Tom Jones, which is the earliest definite and authoritative manifestation of the modern novel. Its relation to De Foe is that of the vertebrate to the invertebrate: to Richardson, that of the real to the ideal—one might almost add, the impossible. It can be compared to no contemporary English work of its own kind; and if we seek for its parallel at the time of publication we must go beyond literature to art—to the masterpiece ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson

... was an art of an art, the penumbra of an art. Its faint outlines melted into one's soul and refused to be turned away. The recollection of other music seemed gross after this curiously introspective, this almost whorl-like, music. It was the return to the invertebrate, the shadow of a shadow, and the hearts of Merville's guests ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... interest to us because the parasites that cause the malarial fevers and various other diseases belong here. These are dependent on two hosts for their existence, the sexual generation usually occuring in an insect or other invertebrate and the ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane

... camp with him indefinitely. I'm his guest, in fact, until you go home. I imagine that as Johnny's guest I ought to enjoy immunity from sarcastic shafts, but I may be mistaken. I've washed and drained most of these worms. Will you lend me an inch or so of that stout invertebrate climbing out of the ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple

... My most distinct disinclination For calling on a rich relation! In her house—(bulwark built between The life man lives and visions seen)— The sunlight hiccups white as chalk, Grown drunk with emptiness of talk, And silence hisses like a snake— Invertebrate and rattling ache.... Then suddenly Eternity Drowns all the houses like a sea And down the street the Trump of Doom Blares madly—shakes the drawing-room Where raw-edged shadows sting forlorn As dank dark nettles. Down the horn Of her ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various

... alive, was evidently in a molluscous, invertebrate condition. He could not sustain himself. She still held him up, a little more at arm's-length, and all at once the reaction from extreme anxiety brought a gush of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... "the cattle" and "the beasts of the earth," and "every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth," in verses 25 and 26; presumably it comprehends all kinds of terrestrial animals, vertebrate and invertebrate, except such as may be comprised under the ...
— The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature - Essay #4 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley

... some large class, such as 'Animal,' and subdivide it deductively into Vertebrate and Invertebrate, yet the principle of division (namely, central structure) has first been reached by a comparison of examples and by generalisation; if, on the other hand, beginning with individuals, we group them inductively into classes, and these again into wider ones (as dogs, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... their assets as were thought fit to rank as backing for their notes. In other words, the note-issuing business would once more have to be regulated on banking principles and controlled by the price asked, for advances, instead of expressing the helplessness and improvidence of an impecunious and invertebrate Government. In this manner the new departure might be a convenient halfway-house on the way from chaos back to sanity. But probably it is too revolutionary and goes too straight in the teeth of the Bank of England's privilege to receive much practical consideration; ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers

... in the "campos"—some of the nests being the refuge of two or three different species, and most of them being connected by vaulted galleries or arcades.(10) Some steps towards the amalgamation of larger divisions of the species for purposes of mutual protection are thus met with even among the invertebrate animals. ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... documents at hand, I quote an extract from the Report on the Invertebrate Animals of Mass., given by Thoreau, Excursions, p. 69: "The distribution of the marine shells is well worthy of notice as a geological fact. Cape Cod, the right arm of the Commonwealth, reaches out into the ocean some fifty or sixty miles. It ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... the military point of view, as Napoleon found to his cost in 1812. She has no vital parts, such as France has in Paris or Germany has in Silesia or Westphalia, upon which the life of the whole State organism depends; she is like some vast multi-cellular invertebrate animal which it is possible to wound but not to destroy. Russia has much to gain from a great European war and hardly anything ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... Zoology Invertebrate Zoology — an advanced course which omits all consideration of insects, and all discussion of parasitic forms. Vertebrate Zoology — mainly a course in comparative morphology, which gives no field knowledge of California vertebrates, ...
— Adequate Preparation for the Teacher of Biological Sciences in Secondary Schools • James Daley McDonald



Words linked to "Invertebrate" :   moss animal, zoology, fauna, creature, animate being, foot, ectoproct, exoskeleton, echinoderm, zoophyte, animal, woodborer, arthropod, shellfish, polyzoan, brute, beast, mollusc, zoological science, ctenophore, comb jelly, rotifer, peanut worm, worm, sponge, peristome, cnidarian, phoronid, sea moss, lampshell, borer, invertebrate foot, poriferan, sea mat, vertebrate, lamp shell, spineless, brachiopod, bryozoan, coelenterate, parazoan, entoproct, mollusk, Symbion pandora



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